Fringy

The Fringe is on, and Richard has free passes for tomorrow night! Last year I set money aside to see some shows, but when the Fringe finally arrived I couldn't find a single thing that appealed to me; shows like The Regina Monologues. The average fringe show is a smutty variety act with some cross-dressing and TV-show theme songs thrown in to amuse the drunks and/or ADD people in the audience, but there are always a few hidden gems. Two years ago I went to a midnight performance of Genet's The Maids, which is rarely staged anymore, and it was awesome. In Winnipeg I saw David Hare's early anti-feminist play Slag ("gals" backwards), which is weird but hilarious - and very truthful. You have to dig through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff, but it's always there... Could it be The Cloister, about Medieval visionary Hildegard von Bingen? Or maybe The Key to Violet's Apartment, in which Violet is inexplicably played by a man who is not in drag but simply wears red nail polish?

We checked out the festivities today, just strolling through the fringe crowds in our old neighborhood. We ran into a guy named Jonathan who appeared in Walterdale's The Rocky Horror Show a few years ago, but I didn't recognize him without the loincloth and gold body paint. (The first thing Richard and I did together at the theatre was help Rocky actors/actresses in and out of their costumes. I volunteered Richard for this without actually telling him first, heehee, but he got over his outrage and got right into it. He's actually quite good at buttoning corsets.) One of the coolest things about theatre is running into people you've worked with on past shows; it gives you a connection that just can't be forgotten (especially Rocky). It's like, "Hey, remember when we didn't want to use fresh cake for Earnest so we just used the same fruitcake for three weeks? And it stuck to the plate? And then Algernon actually ate a piece of it?"